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Valve Brings Family Sharing Plan to Steam

It seems that Microsoft’s sharing plan for the Xbox One was a good idea, or at least Valve seems to think so. The great and beneficent software company announced today that it will be bringing this feature to Steam next week in Beta form.

The way this works is that once a computer is added to a certain Steam account’s “authorized” list, they can play games from that library on their own account, and earn achievements and badges and whatever other crazy gimmick Valve decides to add next.

When the original license holder wants to play, the person using the game is given a couple minutes to either buy the game for themselves and continue playing or save and quit so the account holder can play.

Seems like a pretty smart idea, and knowing Valve it will be implemented in such a way as to cut down on trolling. It’s designed for close friends and family members to play each others games, so be prepared to politely ask your friends to added to their authorized list.

What do you guys think about this move by Valve? Is it awesome? Is it terribad? Is terribad even a word? Yes. Yes it is.

10 thoughts on “Valve Brings Family Sharing Plan to Steam”

I just found out about this yesterday, and it had me intrigued. I like that this is a nice first step in sharing digital content with friends as you would physical copies, maybe it may open up to doing a more solid trade in style system than how Greenman Gaming currently does theirs! I’d definitely like to share my games with a couple friends of mine, so I definitely welcome this with open arms.

I was momentarily pretty excited about this, until I dug deeper and read that only one person can simultaneously access anything in a library at one time, so that if the account owner wants to play something, you’ll get the boot even if you’re playing a different game. Still, interesting concept, and hopefully it will be refined and made more flexible in the future.

@benign1 I wouldn’t hold your breath for that to change. In order for this whole system to work, they have to ensure that only one person is using one license at a time. By enabling multiple people to play on one license at a time, it ensures that the one who is not the original owner will never purchase the game. The point of the system is to emulate the physical lending of a game, not making and giving your friend a copy.

But what benign1 is saying is something I also found out and didn’t like. It’s not just about using 1 game at the same time, I can’t play /anything/ in my library if a friend/family member is playing /anything/ in my library. That’s different than just playing the same game at the same time. If this is the way it stays after beta than there really isn’t a use for it, besides a few of my friends that have different sleep schedules than me I guess…

Yeah it sucks. Its more like the lending of a console than games. The only upside I can see is that im not playing something on steam all the time. So if im playing my PS3, why shouldn’t my brother halfway across the country be playing my games?

It does seem pretty suckish so far. If there’s one thing to be remembered about Steam features, they always started off rather limited and rough, but after time Valve ironed out the issues and concerns, and they became great features!